This year’s NHS Health and Care Innovation Expo was held at the sympathetically converted former train station Manchester Central and felt more like a festival than a trade show. Volunteers from health and social care offered hands-on training sessions at the lunar domes of Camp Expo, which drew on the traditions of the tech industry’s […]
Category: Patient perspectives
Robin E Moulder: The role of patient engagement in error prevention
Imagine being told you have a devastating illness, only to find out months later it was a mistake? Medical diagnostic errors are profoundly damaging to the patient, the clinician, and the healthcare system. Yet, as we know, human error is a reality in our clinical practice. My grandfather had a saying when it came to […]
Tessa Richards: Access to health records—patients first
Criticism of the government’s plan to collect data from patients’ medical records to build a new NHS database—care.data—has been fast and furious. With data collection postponed amid public concern about its confidentiality the government is now fielding advice on how to get its “busted” scheme right next time round. While the research potential of analysing […]
Kate Granger: Why compassionate care is so important
Having terminal cancer is rubbish. There is no way of getting around that fact. I’ve just spent nearly a week in hospital feeling exceptionally unwell and at times wondering whether I was actually going to recover from this episode of febrile neutropenia. But I did and lived to see another day. Cancer has completely changed […]
“e-Patient Dave” deBronkart: 15 year old’s video raises the question—who gets to say what “patient centred” is?
An impromptu in hospital video by a 15 year old took healthcare social media by storm last week. Posted on Forbes.com on Thursday, by the evening it was in the top 25 most popular on the entire Forbes site, with active discussions on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Late on Friday it peaked at #3—on all […]
Tessa Richards: The rise and reach of expert patients
In the Victorian era the patients who acquired public profiles tended to be doubly disadvantaged. Think Joseph Merrick. His fame as the “Elephant Man” stemmed from others exploiting his disfiguring disorder (Proteus syndrome?) for financial gain. Now patients are becoming well known less for shouldering disease burdens so much as using their experience to help […]
Carolyn Thomas: Why physicians must stop saying: “we are all patients”
While noodling around on Linked In one day, I was pleased to notice that the professional networking site has some member groups discussing patient engagement. I’m a heart attack survivor, a blogger, and a women’s health activist—so I also consider myself a fairly engaged patient. Maybe I should drop in on one of these groups […]
Tessa Richards: Lifting the lid on information and learning from it
Progress. The march towards giving patients online access to their medical records is accelerating. The Society of Participatory Medicine has put out the bunting in welcome to the announcement by the OpenNotes initiative that 1.8 million more US patients can see and share full versions of their doctor’s notes; and that big US providers, including […]
Tessa Richards: How can we get better at listening?
Reports urging health professionals to listen to patients and use their experience to improve the quality, value, and safety of healthcare have been flowing thick and fast. Last week another swelled their ranks. In his report on how the NHS might achieve the Shangri La of causing “zero harm,” US health guru Don Berwick headlined […]
Tessa Richards: Stop pushing propaganda to patients
There is something to be said for wearing your heart on your sleeve, and few do it to greater effect than Margaret McCartney, a GP in Glasgow. She exuded frustration as she galvanised a session on public and patient involvement at the Evidence Live conference, in which she explained why she had reached the point […]